Cosmological stabilization of moduli with steep potentials

Abstract

A scenario which overcomes the well-known cosmological overshoot problem associated with stabilizing moduli with steep potentials in string theory is proposed. Our proposal relies on the fact that moduli potentials are very steep and that generically their kinetic energy quickly becomes dominant. However, moduli kinetic energy red-shifts faster than other sources when the universe expands. So, if any additional sources are present, even in very small amounts, they will inevitably become dominant. We show that in this case cosmic friction allows the dissipation of the large amount of moduli kinetic energy that is required for the field to be able to find an extremely shallow minimum. We present the idea using analytic methods and verify with some numerical examples.